“Slow down here, girl. Let’s go to my place and talk about it while we wait for the police to arrive.”

  Jo’s home phone rang—the sound muted and dull. It took them five rings to find the thing under a slashed couch cushion. When Jo said “Hello” she expected to find that her caller had already hung up.

  “Jo,” Jack said. “Thank God. Are you all right? Chris said—”

  “You talked to Chris? He’s okay?” Jo sank onto her couch. Her clenched chest suddenly released enough to allow a much needed breath. “Chris is okay,” she told Keisha.

  “Wait, Jo,” Jack went on. “I didn’t talk to him directly. When I checked my voice mail, I got his message.”

  “What did he say? Was he here when this happened?”

  “He just said someone broke in to your place. I didn’t understand what he meant at first. He said to tell you it wasn’t him. ‘Tell her I wouldn’t do that to her,’ he said. Is there much damage?”

  Jo groaned. “It’s a mess, Jack. Did Chris see who did this? It was Cole, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t think he stuck around to find out. I don’t even know how he got away. He only told me he was calling from a pay phone down the street from Sloan and Whiteside’s.”

  “What the hell does he think he’s doing? He’s going to get himself killed, Jack. We’ve got to stop him.”

  “I’m headed there as soon as I hang up.”

  “I’ll be there in about twenty minutes. Keisha can talk to the police when they finally get here.”

  “Jo, no. There’s no reason—”

  She hung up in the middle of his sentence. It was her turn to insist he shouldn’t go alone.

  Chapter 47

  Sidney Cole pulled Mr. Whiteside’s Lincoln into the alley between the funeral home and the warehouse. Stopping just short of the entrance doors, he sat and relived the thrill. He didn’t even care that after three hours of searching, he still hadn’t found either the woman or the boy. Such power he’d felt tearing through her apartment. Smashing mirrors. Slashing cushions until feathers and foam swirled in the air like snow.

  Even the escalating fear had been arousing. Would neighbors call the police? What would Quinlan do if he didn’t bring either one of them back? He was being bad, so bad. Not caring for once. He had an erection just sitting there thinking about it.

  The rush of blood gave him courage as he stepped out of the car and prepared to tell Quinlan that he had failed. All he’d found to bring back were some papers and the computer from her apartment. She may have already documented some evidence against them.

  The warehouse was quiet and dark inside, though it was past the time they’d set to meet here. Maybe Quinlan’s banquet had gone later than expected. If so …

  Sidney’s eyes went to the stairs. He gave the throb in his groin a tweak of pleasant pain with fingers curled and pressing. There was time, maybe, to visit his beauties. He would hear Quinlan when he arrived. The man would call out, or his footsteps would make the last stair creak if he made it that far. It had been so long since he’d had time alone with his women.

  He walked in darkness, preferring the subtle shadows. His eyes adjusted easily to the gloom. When he reached for the banister his hand found a broomstick leaning against the wall. Part of him wondered who had left it there, but anticipation didn’t care about something as unimportant as that.

  He walked up the stairs slowly, touching himself, preparing. He had to pause on the second floor landing. The tremors rose too quickly, his breath coming in gasps. He willed the wave of desire to still a little before he continued up the last flight.

  The light coming from the open door of his special room was like a dousing of ice water. His breath drew in with a hiss. His erection shrank, his skin suddenly cold and clammy. Then Philip Quinlan stepped out into the hallway and Sidney felt an unmanly faintness. He reached out, touching the wall to ground himself.

  “There you are,” Quinlan said. He was all silhouette. His feet planted firmly, hands on his hips, the light from the doorway behind him. “Finally. And I suspect, empty handed. Am I right?”

  Sidney breathed in deeply before he answered. “She wasn’t home. I left her a warning, and brought her computer and some papers.”

  “You failed, is what you did. And in the meantime,” he jerked his head toward the room he had just left. “I’ve had to do your dirty work for you. Most of it.”

  For a moment, Sidney thought he meant his beauties. Quinlan had done something to his women. The bastard, the interfering, pompous …. He started toward the man, hands fisted, temples tight with the beat of his pulse. Then caught what else he was saying.

  “He had a gun, if you can believe it. A homeless street kid with no money to buy food. Yet he manages to get hold of a weapon. Sometimes I think Whiteside is right, this town is sinking into the gutter. So, do you think you can handle this task finally, now that I’ve delivered it tied up with a pretty red ribbon?”

  Sidney had reached the doorway and looked in to find the boy he’d been looking for. With black ringlets covering his unconscious face, his shirt torn half off, he had been dumped on the floor next to Lucy’s bed. Lucy, his favorite and the most beautiful of his beauties.

  “Give me the keys to the car,” Quinlan said. “I’ll take her computer into the office. Just so we know what she might have already passed on to someone.”

  Sidney’s fingers trembled with rage and fear as he dropped the keys in the other man’s waiting palm. Their eyes met.

  “This other issue …” Quinlan said, nodding toward the bodies painted and primped and posed just the way Sidney Cole liked best, “…we’ll talk about that when I get back. Your debt to me is growing, son. You’d best start thinking how you plan to pay.”

  Sidney entered the room and closed the door behind him. The latch had been broken, so he locked it with the deadbolt he’d installed himself but seldom used. He picked up a baseball bat from a straight chair against the wall it and sat down, not even questioning where it came from. He caressed the smooth wooden shaft as he watched the half naked boy.

  He’s the one. He did it. Him and that black whore. They both deserved what they got. Deserved worse. Deserved to die together and painfully. Sidney shut his eyes. One hand gripped the top of his head to keep it from exploding. Too late, too late for that. One blow, one blow and that little neck had snapped just like …. He shuddered, remembering. Just like Granny’s leg when she fell down those stairs. Stupid, clumsy fool, she’d called him. And he wanted to do it again, could feel his hands itching to push her down another stairway, down a well, deep and dark where no one would ever find her.

  “It’s too good for them,” he whispered, suddenly knowing what he needed to do. “It’s too good for both of them.”

  Chapter 48

  Luciano’s call came in when Jo was almost halfway to Lakeview. Praying it was Jack or Chris with good news, she tapped on her bluetooth with a breathless and eager, “Hello?”

  “Jo, darling, I have been ringing and ringing and the phone …”

  God damn it. It was the Latin lothario.

  “Look, Luciano, I don’t have time right now.”

  “But I must warn you. I promised in my message that I would tell you the news.”

  “Look, Luciano, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m having a crisis right now. My apartment is trashed and I’ve got to stop this kid from—”

  “But, Jo, please, you must listen to me, it is a matter of life or death.”

  Exasperated by his usual melodrama, she started to tell him to shut the hell up when she realized what he was saying.

  “… when the police arrived, he finally admitted that he gave them the authority to take custody of the bodies. Research, he told us. For the good of science. Spouting such nonsense. But he knew your name, and I knew that I must find out more.”

  “My name? Who? What are you talking about? I didn’t get any message. I told you, someone trashed my apartment. The answering machine is history.”

  So he told her that Tim Reynolds had been providing Dean Whiteside with the bodies he needed to perfect his new sublimation method. “I knew it,” she’d interrupted. But what she hadn’t known is that Tim Reynolds always made sure that no body was signed over to Sloan and Whiteside’s unless all avenues to find someone with a legitimate claim to the remains had been exhausted.

  “He is willing, he says, to swear in a court of law that except for one instance, all remains were unclaimed and destined for Homewood Gardens anyway. And a relative of the one exception signed away rights to the body to Mr. Whiteside himself. That at least is true. I have the paper in front of me. A Mr. Philip Quinlan gave permission months ago—”

  “Who?” Jo shouted at him. “Who did you just say?”

  But the name was the same when he said it the second time. Philip Quinlan, the same Philip Quinlan of Eternities International, had agreed to let Sloan and Whiteside’s dispose of the body of one Thomas Finnegan Piper.

  “Mr. Quinlan had the power of attorney, you see,” Luciano went on. “Ever since his brother-in-law was committed to a drug rehabilitation program several years ago. Because he was an alcoholic, Mr. Piper had been stripped of all authority to control his own fortune. In Scotland, it seems. I called a few friends, of course, to verify all is truth. Imagine, Madonna,” Luciano went on, smoother now that he could tell he had her full attention, “a homeless old man, worth more money that I will probably make in my whole lifetime.”

  Son of a bitch stopped sending it, Tommy had told Samuel. And now she knew who the SOB was and where the money came from. And possibly the truth about whether or not someone had been following the Brit around shortly before his death. “Ain’t no such thing as coincidence,” Samuel had said earlier. Damn right.

  Luciano had not much more to add. Jo barely paid attention to his warning that someone from Sloan and Whiteside’s had asked Tim Reynolds about her just that morning, wondering if she had been around asking questions.

  “That’s water under the bridge, Luciano,” she told him. “They already knew my name. In fact, it looks like they even found out where I live.”

  She was a half block away from the funeral home and started watching for Jack’s beat up VW.

  “Look, Luciano, I promise to call you tomorrow to explain, but right now, I really have to go. Listen,” she paused and shook her head, but said it anyway, “I owe you big time for this, but only two nights on the town, nothing more. Anything more intimate than that’s going to take a force of nature and can’t be bought, understand?”

  She seemed to have gotten there before Jack. Both the funeral home and the warehouse across the alley were quiet and dark. After one trip around the block, she pulled into a parking space just down the street and waited.

  It was clear to her that the Brit’s death had been murder. One committed or paid for by his smooth business-savvy brother-in-law Philip Quinlan. Why Quinlan had elected to preserve the body indefinitely instead of welcoming an obscure and quiet grave was still unknown. The answer must mean he was waiting for something, for some reason.

  So what was she sitting here waiting for? For Dean Whiteside to open the front door and give himself up? For Chris and Lexie to come running out of the warehouse hand in hand and jump in her car so they could all go live happily ever after?

  Five minutes passed. Ten. Her hand reached out to open the door. She put one foot out on the pavement. Despite the fact that she couldn’t seem to breathe, she started to get out.

  The door was wrenched from her grip and a body slammed into her, pushing her across the shift console, sliding into the car beside her. “Quiet,” said a gruff voice. A hand grabbed her wrist. “No screaming.”

  Jo had fallen across the passenger seat, her feet still on the driver’s side. Her thigh pressed painfully against the shifter knob. Her head throbbed from smacking against the arm rest. Panic and poor lighting blinded her, making the man in her car for a moment no more than a cold grip around her wrist and a husky voice.

  Then he lifted his face to look toward the alley and the street lamp illumined his face. Dark hair, dark complexion, an angular face with eyes that she knew were—hazel, damn them. Hazel eyes that were going to be black and blue as soon as she could struggle to a dignified sitting position.

  “Jack Prescott,” Jo sputtered. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  She pulled her legs over to her side and sat up, trying her best to scowl at him. But the truth was she was relieved to see him.

  “What are we waiting for? We’ve got to go see if Chris is—.”

  “Jo.” Jack put a calming hand on her thigh. Then he pointed out the window.

  Jo followed his gaze just as someone stepped into the mouth of the alley. The person disappeared before Jo could tell what he looked like, but was back in what seemed less than a minute. A young man leaned against the corner of the building and glanced toward Jo’s car. It was Moon, the black youth who’d met them at the Planetarium. Taking a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, he tapped one out. The flare of a match illuminated the quick nod he threw their way.

  “You planned on breaking into the place all along, didn’t you?” she asked Jack. “Some moral influence you are on these kids.” But she was grinning and he didn’t appear to be listening anyway.

  “If I could talk you into staying here,” he said, “I would. But since I know that won’t work, do you at least have a tire iron or something in here you could bring for protection?”

  “No tire iron. Just this.” She reached under the seat and pulled out The Club, a steering wheel lock she hadn’t used since her first year of living in the city. She’d always felt the double metal bar looked like it could be a powerful weapon if swung at an enemy’s head.

  Jack nodded in approval. “It’ll do.”

  Moon greeted them with a grin. “You sure you wanna do this, Jack-man?” he said quietly. “Pale dude that just drove in there—he pretty big, know what I’m saying? Don’t want him to wipe the street up with your ass, man.”

  “Cole,” Jo whispered, looking at Jack.

  “Then some other guy came out while I was sneaking up on the door,” Moon went on.

  “Did he see you?” Jack asked.

  “I jumped behind a dumpster, man. I’m no fool. You know that. He went into the building across the way.”

  Jack slipped payment into the boy’s hand and gripped his shoulder briefly in a silent thank you. The youth saluted with two fingers and strode off down the street

  Jo walked to the edge of the building and leaned her shoulder against it. Slowly moving her head forward, she looked down the alley. The streetlight reflected off the taillights of the Town Car just beyond the warehouse doorway.

  “Should we call the police?” she asked Jack.

  “And tell them what, that we’re breaking and entering? We don’t know what’s going on yet, Jo, if anything. Let’s go.” He tugged on her sleeve as he walked around her.

  Jo followed him down the alley. Her heart raced. When they reached the door, Jack turned back and put one finger to his lips before reaching for the knob. The door resisted a second, then opened easily. Jack hesitated when the opening was two inches wide. They both waited, listening. Jo found that she was grasping the elbow of Jack’s denim jacket.

  When all hell didn’t break loose, Jack opened the door all the way, slowly. They stepped in, Jo at Jack’s heels, leaning close. They both stopped just over the threshold.

  “How did Moon do that, unlock the door?” she whispered into Jack’s ear, but he only shrugged in response. She had a feeling he didn’t want to know.

  The heavy door closed behind them, latching with a nearly silent, newly oiled click.

  Chapter 49

  Pain. And waves of nausea. He didn’t want to open his eyes. But he didn’t remember why. He tried to move away from the pain, shifted on the soft mattress under him.

  Mattress? Then memory returned. Lexie. He’d seen Lexie. In that chamber. Dead. Naked. Dead. Lexie.

  He groaned, moved again. His hand touched something next to him. He had to open his eyes to see what it was. He didn’t want to see what it was. He opened his eyes.

  Holy fucking shit. Fear snapped him upright and he reared up. Pulling his feet under him, he backed away as far as he could. He cowered with his back in the corner between wall and footboard and stared at his bedmate.

  He was in bed with her. With Lexie. Dead Lexie draped with scarves like some African queen.

  He turned, leaned over the footboard. Vomited. The stench made him sicker. The spasms grew more violent.

  Only when his stomach had emptied did he notice Sidney Cole watching from a chair by the door. He looked like he’d been there a long time, watching him vomit, standing guard over him.

  And he looked pissed.

  Chris could tell that from the way the narrowed eyes stared without blinking. From the way Cole’s jaw was clenched and his shoulders tensed. He could tell it from the way the man held a baseball bat in a firm grip. Like he couldn’t wait to start swinging it.

  “You cause so much trouble.” Cole put one hand on the top of his head and tightened his fingers, like he had a headache. “You and her both. That whore, that worthless whore.”

  “At least we don’t fuck corpses,” Chris said.

  Cole rose suddenly. The chair skittered back a few inches to hit the wall. He didn’t step forward, but the shaft of the bat rested in the palm of his hand.

  “I’m a good man,” he said. “I mind my business, that’s all. But no one seems to let me mind it alone. If it was just me and my secret, it would be easier, maybe. But no, Quinlan’s got the power. He pushes you this way, then that, till he’s got you in a corner. And there ain’t—” he paused, drew himself up a little, “—isn’t—any way out but his way.”

  Suddenly he swung with the bat, smashing it into the door, sending splinters of wood flying. “The bastard—the fucking bastard.”

  He turned to Chris. His eyes burned with anger like a flame inside. “I’d just as soon break your neck as talk to you, you troublemaking little prick,” Cole said. “But Quinlan told me yesterday. Find out what he knows first. Tell him all you want to do is find out who he talked to and then he can go. Promise him money, he said, he’ll fall for that.”

 

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